It's been a troubling couple of weeks for Mandriva, but I decided not to report on it since I found it hard to unravel the events leading up to all this. Now, though, the story has come to its (logical) conclusion: now that most of Mandriva's employees have been laid off, they came together and forked Mandriva. Enter Mageia.

Ahhh, the old "I reject your reality and substitute my own" argument. Is it really better if you have to learn the name of the distro with your app, rather than the name of the app? What if you need to do math and multimedia? Do you dual boot?

What are the different use cases this fork came about for? Those who need an established floundering general purpose distro stay with Mandriva, and those who want a floundering general purpose startup go with Megia? Nice.

I think you would have been better of with a simple "I disagree."

Yep. Distros and forks are made just because no one can prevent them, it's the nature of the open source beast. That doesn't sound nearly as planned and intellectual as "made to cover every possible use case", though